“I can supply all the diamonds you need,” said Chikwere,
explaining that he sneaked them into Mozambique after buying
them from Zimbabwean soldiers.

Chikwere and hundreds of other border smugglers are part of
a chain whose money flows back into Zimbabwe, whose president
for three decades, Robert Mugabe, has ruled over four violent
and disputed elections since 2000. Mugabe’s policies of land
seizure helped cause the economy, once the second-biggest in
southern Africa, to shrink by 50 percent in eight years.

The gems from Zimbabwe’s biggest diamond field in the
Marange region are helping enrich the 86-year-old president’s
party ahead of next year’s vote, according to Human Rights
Watch, Partnership Africa Canada and the Zimbabwean opposition
party, Movement for Democratic Change, which governs in a forced
coalition with Mugabe’s party.

Annual income from the gems may reach $2 billion, assuming
the country is able to export them freely, the state-owned
Herald newspaper cited Mines Minister Obert Mpofu as saying in
October. Mugabe is trying to amass funds for the election
campaign, said Tom Porteous, the U.K. director of New York-based
Human Rights Watch, which has lobbied against abuses for the
past 30 years.

“Revenue from the mines is serving to prop up Mugabe and
his cronies,” Porteous said in a Dec. 8 response to e-mailed
questions. “There are real concerns that diamond revenue will
be used to fund political violence and intimidation of Mugabe’s
opponents.”

Soldiers and Diggers

Human Rights Watch cited interviews with unidentified
soldiers, diggers, community leaders and members of government
and the parliamentary portfolio committee on mines and energy to
support its allegations.

Partnership Africa Canada, an Ottawa-based nonprofit
organization, said in a June report that Marange is controlled
by the military and proceeds from the gems aren’t benefiting the
country. The group cited testimony in Zimbabwe’s parliament,
company statements, and interviews with unidentified diplomats
and illegal miners for its conclusions.

Illegal smuggling benefits Mugabe because it is mostly
carried out via the military, according to the two nonprofits
and interviews with six smugglers and two dealers in and around
Vila de Manica, where Chikwere, clad in Diesel jeans and wearing
two gold chains, was displaying his wares.

Finance Ministry

The army reports to the president. The Finance Ministry, by
contrast, is controlled by Morgan Tsvangirai’s Movement for
Democratic Change, or MDC, and receives revenue from legal
diamond mining in the form of taxes.

“These are just inventions of the western imperialists who
are trying to discredit Zanu-PF,” party spokesman Rugare Gumbo
said in a Dec. 6 interview from Harare, the country’s capital.
“There is no corruption at Marange and Zanu-PF is not using the
proceeds.”

Diamonds from Marange can’t be exported legally from
Zimbabwe because the field hasn’t yet met an international
certification standard showing that proceeds from sales aren’t
used to finance conflict.

Mining at Marange has been subject to allegations of
military abuses of unauthorized miners and disputes over
ownership of the deposit. Human Rights Watch said in June that
200 miners were killed in 2008 at the site by the military, and
also reported that the army controls most of the deposits and is
forcing local community members to mine the gems on its behalf.

Kimberley Process

Soldiers are smuggling gems across the border, according to
Human Rights Watch, which cited information it has obtained and
interviews with unidentified people.

Mozambique isn’t a member of the so-called Kimberley
Process, an organization that includes governments and diamond
industry companies and is designed to reduce the number of so-called conflict diamonds in the world. The Jerusalem-based group
said it couldn’t decide on whether to allow unfettered exports
from Marange at a meeting that ended on Nov. 4.

The Kimberley Process says it has reduced the proportion of
conflict diamonds in the world trade to 1 percent from 15
percent. Signatories, which include all major diamond-producing
and buying countries, have pledged that they won’t deal in
uncertified gems.

While the Kimberley Process has allowed two “limited”
auctions of gems from Marange this year, the state-owned
Chronicle newspaper said an August sale earned the government
$30 million. By contrast, Central Bank Governor Gideon Gono said
in 2007 that smuggling from the Marange site was costing the
country as much as $40 million a week.

Paying Civil Servants

“We need the money to pay civil servants,” said Finance
Minister Tendai Biti, a member of the MDC, in a Dec. 3 interview
from Harare. “We must rein in the political elite who are
prospering from the stones.”

In the past decade, Mugabe has seized land from white
farmers and given it to blacks, including government officials,
and made proposals that would force foreign companies to sell 51
percent of their assets to black Zimbabweans.

The result has been a 50 percent decline in the production
of tobacco, the country’s biggest export in 2000, while corn
production has fallen by more than half, causing national
famines. Gross domestic product shrank by 50 percent between
2000 and 2008, and the country scrapped its currency, the
Zimbabwe dollar, in 2009 as inflation rose.

Attempts to attract aid to help the economy haven’t been
successful: The country received $3 million from foreign donors
in the first quarter of 2010, 0.4 percent of its annual target,
according to Biti.

Contested Election

The MDC said in a Dec. 17 statement that it holds the
leadership of the Zanu-PF party responsible “for years of
plunder and human rights abuses at the mine fields.”

Mugabe’s party narrowly won an election in 2000 against the
MDC amid complaints of attacks and murders of opposition
supporters. Tsvangirai came back in 2008 and beat Mugabe in a
first-round presidential vote, though he failed to get the 51
percent needed to avoid a runoff. He then boycotted the runoff,
citing violence. Mugabe’s party was forced by neighboring states
into a coalition with the MDC in February 2009.

Tsvangirai has twice been unsuccessfully charged with
treason and underwent a brain scan in 2007 for a suspected skull
fracture after he was beaten by police.

Mugabe said Dec. 17 at an annual conference of his party in
Mutare that the coalition government needs to come to an end.
The MDC is “dragging their feet on elections,” he said, adding
that general and presidential polls should be held next year.

Constitutional Wrangle

Mugabe’s party has frustrated attempts to implement a new
constitution, according to the MDC, which is demanding such
steps as a condition for elections.

Diamond fields in eastern Zimbabwe were seized in December
2006 from Maidstone, England-based African Consolidated
Resources Plc by the Zimbabwean government.

Since then, thousands of illegal miners have periodically
been evicted from the deposits, according to Human Rights Watch.
Mbada Investments (Pvt) Ltd., in which Johannesburg-based scrap
metal company New Reclamation Group Ltd. has a stake, runs a
mining concession at part of the site with the state-owned
Zimbabwe Mineral Development Corp.

Members of Zimbabwe’s political elite ranging from Mugabe’s
wife, Grace, to military leaders allegedly profited from illegal
trading of diamonds, according to a November 2008 U.S.
diplomatic cable published by WikiLeaks. In the cable, former
American ambassador to Zimbabwe James D. McGee cited an industry
official and a senior member of Mugabe’s party as his sources.

‘Where is the Evidence?’

“The allegations made against the First Lady and others
regarding illegal diamonds from Marange are scandalous and
untrue,” George Charamba, Mugabe’s spokesman, said in a Dec. 22
interview from Harare. “Where is the evidence? There is no
wrongdoing in Marange.”

The soldiers are very open, said a Nigerian gem dealer in
Chimoio, capital of Mozambique’s Manica province, who repeatedly
said his name was Colonel Rambo. They give their cut to their
superior officers, who in turn surrender a percentage to
politicians in Zimbabwe, he said.

He displayed a suitcase full of $100 bills that he said
amounted to more than $1 million. Ministers are involved in this
business on the other side of the border, he said.

David Kassel, New Reclamation’s chairman, declined to
comment when called on Dec. 15. London-based Old Mutual Plc,
which owns “less than 6 percent” of New Reclamation, said in
an e-mailed response to questions that its actions are guided by
the Kimberley Process and Zimbabwean laws. No allegations of
illegal action have been made against Old Mutual or New
Reclamation. New Reclamation didn’t respond to a Dec. 17 e-mail.

No Arrests

“We have not arrested anyone for dealing in diamonds
because no one has reported to us violations of any law,”
Belmar Mutadiwa, a police spokesman for Mozambique’s Manica
province, said in a Dec. 6 interview. “Most of the dealers
operating in the province have been licensed by the government
to buy precious and semi-precious stones.”

A police station in Vila de Manica is situated on a street
where dealers from Guinea, Lebanon, Sierra Leone and Nigeria --
who all disclosed their nationalities in interviews -- trade on
the porches of their houses. Security guards sit outside.

Mercedes, Humvee and Range Rover vehicles drive down the
town’s streets, lined by freshly painted houses sprouting
satellite television dishes. By contrast, the 750-mile drive to
the region from Mozambique’s capital, Maputo, runs through small
towns where ramshackle buildings are side-by-side with grass
shacks known as baraccas.

Purchase Point

Vila de Manica has “become one of the premier purchase and
departure points for Marange’s illegal diamonds,” Partnership
Africa Canada said in a June report on its website.

“Diamonds are being sold in this district, after they’ve
been smuggled from Zimbabwe”, said Jose Tefula, district
administrator for Manica District, in a Dec. 20 phone interview.
“Locally we don’t have any diamonds, so the stones can only
come from Zimbabwe.”

Three messages left at the Manica branch of the Department
of Mineral Resources weren’t returned.

A group of about 40 diamond dealers surrounded the vehicle
in which two Bloomberg reporters were travelling in Vila de
Manica on Nov. 26. They banged the side of the car with their
fists, blocked the escape route with motor vehicles, seized and
damaged a camera and shouted “you’re dying today.”

Two policemen arrived and detained the reporters for almost
an hour, saying they should have sought permission to enter the
area. No action was taken against the dealers.

No Details

New Reclamation rebuffed a petition made by Johannesburg’s
Southern African Litigation Centre in October through the Access
to Information Act for details of its involvement in Zimbabwe’s
diamond industry, Nicole Fritz, the group’s director, said on
Dec. 15 from her mobile phone. New Reclamation’s Kassel declined
to comment and put the phone down when asked about Marange.

Marange’s deposits may contain 1,000 carats of gems per
hundred tons of ore, the official said in the cable posted on
WikiLeaks, citing a geologist’s report prepared for De Beers,
the world’s biggest diamond company. That compares with a grade
of 120 carats at Rio Tinto Plc’s Murowa mine in Zimbabwe, the
official said.

Tom Tweedy, a spokesman for Johannesburg-based De Beers,
declined to comment on Dec. 9.

More Than Botswana

Zimbabwe may mine 40 million carats of diamonds annually
within three years, the state-controlled Herald reported Oct.
18, citing Mpofu. Botswana, the world’s biggest diamond producer
by value, expects gem production of 24 million carats this year.

Murowa produced 97,000 carats of diamonds in 2009 while
production at the country’s other diamond mine, River Ranch,
isn’t disclosed. Total national official production in 2007 was
695,000 carats, worth $31 million, according to the Herald.

“We believe the new intransigence of Zanu-PF is down to
its finding of an infinite source of wealth,” Fritz said.
“There is this race to elections.”

In Vila de Manica, smuggler Chikwere boasted that there was
no limit to the amount of stones he could bring into Mozambique.